Examining Cycles in Different Content Areas


Most Scientific Disiplines have a type of cycle:

  • Rock Cycle
  • Kreb Cycle
  • Carbon Cycle


How do these tie into Scientific Process?

  • These are models (have predictive value)
  • Observation driven in some places (e.g., weathering and erosion)
  • Can make inferences about those things we can not see/observe

How do we approach teaching/present order?

  • Do you start with a conceptual framework (cycle) to guide the discovery OR
  • Do you start with observations that guide the discovery to understand the framework

How do we help our students with identification?

  • Help students to understand why this is important
  • Can they make exploratory observation without context? (e.g., grouping types of clouds)
  • Get students to make scientific questions.
  • Leads to understanding of where scientific classification comes from.
  • Can be a very logically progressive way of presenting the process of scientific building of knowledge. (where did it come from, how did it get this way, why are they this way--leads to more scientific questioning)
  • Once we make this observation process explicit and point out the connections to the process of science--where do we go next? What do we ask them? What do we ask them to do? How do we lead them from the direct observation to the indirect inferences (e.g., non-obvious connections between what we see in a rock and how we know what that means: big crystals formed deep under the surface--how do we know that?)?

Getting students to start making connections about what we know and how we know it

  • Help students to formulate ideas about how we know something that's not directly observable
  • Conduct a simulation exercise that models possible processes
  • Generate ideas of possible explanations of how rocks were made--which ones are scientifically testable ideas? What kind of evidence would a geologist look for?
  • Help students in learning to deal with uncertainty--not all ideas can be tested, which ones can we work with based on the tools/data we have. Some of the data may explain more than one possible proposed idea--and that's ok: importance of multiple working hypotheses.

Ideas about formation of Granite--how did it get here?

  • Possible student ideas?
    • cemented pieces
    • from volcanoes
  • Possible data examples
    • microscopic images
    • geologic maps
    • Narrative about someone/some folks figuring out what happened that was not directly observable: comparison of different stories (e.g., Alvarez meteor collision, Western Washington Megafloods, possible examples of non-successful failures: Cope & Marsh's fight for dinosaur recognition led to the development of a dinosaur that isn't real because he put together two different species; Fleischmann and Pons set back the field of Cold Fusion because of their frauded data)
  • Concerns: is this too open ended and too exploratory, how do we constrain these into a more "controlled aspect" so we can know that students learn certain content-based information (how do we make sure we keep the content as we have them engage in the process).

Plate Tectonic Jigsaw

  • Activity from Discovering Plate Boundaries by Dale Sawyer out of Rice University around earthquakes, ocean floor geochronology (rock ages and magnetic properties), worldwide topography, volcanoes; different plate boundaries
  • Questions about the process of science
    • What did you do?
    • How is that analogous to what scientists do? (modeling the scientific community process of shared practices)
  • Need to ask students implication of what this means?
    • What other questions do they have?
    • Where are there areas that don't fit our model?